India Fares Better Than China in Bribery Survey

Chinese companies trail only their Russian counterparts in how often they use bribes to get what they want, according to a new survey, in the latest reminder of the challenge that Beijing’s anticorruption efforts face.

Indranil Mukherjee/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

India showed a slight improvement in a new anticorruption study, but still lingers close to the bottom.

India, meanwhile, showed a slight improvement but still lingered among the bottom one-third of the countries surveyed.

Transparency International, the Berlin-based anticorruption group, said the businesspeople it surveyed believe companies headquartered in China engage in bribery far more often than do others based just about anywhere else. China posted a score of 6.5 on a scale in which zero indicates that companies in a country use bribes all the time and 10 represents companies that never use bribery. Only Russia, at 6.1, posted a lower score among the 28 countries counted.

The group praised China’s willingness to toughen laws against such practices. Still, it said, the effort “also requires sufficient enforcement processes and resources, international cooperation and, moreover, the continued willingness of the authorities to treat this issue as an important priority.”

The results matched those of a similar survey in 2008, which also ranked Russia and China as the lowest and second-lowest respectively.

Chinese central government officials have acknowledged that corruption is a major impediment to the country’s continued economic development. Premier Wen Jiabao described it as “the greatest danger” facing the Communist Party in a speech delivered last year and have toughened laws accordingly. A new law passed this year makes it a crime for Chinese citizens and companies to bribe foreign officials. Its regulators have begun probes of the telecommunications industry and the railway ministry, while its courts have also passed a number of tough judgments against those accused of corruption.

Still, corruption broadly remains a major issue. Transparency International said it found a correlation between corporate bribery within a country and how clean public officials are perceived to be. It cited its 2010 corruption-perception index, in which China was No. 78 out of 178 countries surveyed.

India, another economy closely watched for its anticorruption efforts, fared somewhat better. The index showed that India was the “most improved” when it comes to foreign bribery, earning a slightly higher score of 7.5, compared with 6.8 in the 2008 study.

But India is by no means corruption-free. Despite its improvement, India landed close to the bottom of the foreign bribery table – at No. 19, along with Taiwan and Turkey. And when it comes to local businesses, entrepreneurs regularly complain that corruption is one of the main obstacles to setting up a company here, as this recent article in The Wall Street Journal shows.

The Transparency International survey included results from surveys of more than 3,000 business executives between May and July. It said it surveyed at least 100 executives in each country except China, where it surveyed 87.

Corrections & Amplifications:Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao delivered his speech against corruption last year. An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that he delivered the speech earlier this year.

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